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The Mukden Incident of September 18, 1931, known in Japanese as the Manchurian Incident, occurred in southern Manchuria when a section of railroad, owned by Japan\'s South Manchuria Railway, near Mukden (today\'s Shenyang) was dynamited by Japanese junior officers.Fenby, Jonathan. Chiang Kai-shek: China\'s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost. Carroll & Graf Publishers. 2003. pp. 202 Imperial Japan\'s military accused Chinese dissidents of the act, thus providing a pretext for the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. The incident represented an early event in the Second Sino-Japanese War, although full-scale war would not start until 1937. In Chinese, this incident is referred to as the September 18 Incident (Chinese: 九·一八事变/九·一八事變 → Jiǔyībā Shìbiàn) or Liutiaogou Incident (Chinese:柳条沟事变/柳條溝事變 → Liǔtiáogōu Shìbiàn), or in Japanese as the Manchurian Incident (Kyūjitai: 滿洲事變, Manshujihen: 満州事変).
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The aim of Japanese junior officers in Manchuria was to provide a ruse that would justify Japanese military invasion and replace the Chinese presence in the region with either a Japanese puppet one. They chose to sabotage the rail section in an area near Liǔtiáo Lake (柳條湖 → liǔtiáohú). The fact was that the area had no official name and was not militarily important to either the Japanese or the Chinese. But it was only eight hundred meters away from the Chinese garrison of Beidaying (北大營 → bèidàyíng), which was stationed by troops under the command of the "Young Marshal" Xueliang. The alleged Japanese plan was to attract Chinese troops by an explosion and then blame them for having caused it to provide a pretext for a formal Japanese invasion. In addition, to make the sabotage appear more convincingly as a calculated Chinese attack on an essential target — thereby masking the Japanese action as a legitimate measure to protect a vital railway of industrial and economic importance — the Japanese press labeled the site "Liǔtiáo Ditch" (柳條溝 → liǔtiáogōu) or "Liǔtiáo Bridge" (柳條橋 → liǔtiáoqiáo), when in reality the site was a small railway section laid on an area of flat land. The choice to place the explosives at this site was to preclude the extensive reconstruction that would have been necessitated had the site truly been a railway bridge.
Colonel Itagaki Seishiro, Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, Colonel Kenji Doihara, and Major Takayoshi TanakaEdward Behr, The Last Emperor, 1987, p. 180 had laid complete plans for the incident by May 31, 1931. An important part of the scheme was to construct a swimming pool at the Japanese officers\' club in Mukden. This "swimming pool" was actually a concrete bunker for two 9.2-inch artillery pieces, which were brought in under complete secrecy.Edward Behr, ibid, p. 180
The plan was executed when 1st Lt. Komoto of Independent Garrison Unit (独立守備隊), which guarded the South Manchuria Railway, placed explosives near the tracks, but far enough away to do no real damage. At around 10:20PM (22:20), September 18, the explosives were detonated. However, the explosion was minor and only a 1.5 meter section on one side of the rail was damaged. In fact, a train from Changchun passed by the site on this damaged track without difficulty and arrived at Shenyang at 10:30PM (22:30). CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR INTERNATIONAL EVENTS FROM 1931 THROUGH 1943, WITH OSTENSIBLE REASONS ADVANCED FOR THE OCCURRENCE THEREOF 78th Congress, 2d Session. "An explosion undoubtedly occurred on or near the railroad between 10 and 10:30 p.m. on September 18th, but the damage, if any, to the railroad did not in fact prevent the punctual arrival of the south-bound train from Changchun, and was not in itself sufficient to justify military action. The military operations of the Japanese troops during this night, . . . cannot be regarded as measures of legitimate self-defence . . ." [Opinion of Commission of Enquiry.] Ibid., p. 71. ,
Main Article: Invasion of Manchuria
On the morning of September 19, the two artillery pieces installed at the Mukden officers\' club opened up on the Chinese garrison nearby, in response to the alleged (by the Japanese) Chinese attack on the railway. Zhang Xueliang\'s small airforce was destroyed and the Chinese soldiers fled their destroyed Beidaying barracks as five hundred Japanese troops attacked the Chinese garrison of around seven thousand. The Chinese troops, mostly irregulars or new conscripts, were no match for the experienced troops the Japanese had prepared for the attack. By the evening of September 19, 1931, the fighting was over and the Japanese had occupied Mukden at the cost of five hundred Chinese and only two Japanese lives.Edward Behr, ibid, p. 182
Zhang Xueliang, under implicit approval from Chiang Kai-shek\'s Nationalist Government to adhere to the nonresistance policy, had already urged his men to not put up a fight or contest any attack, and to store away any weapons in case the Japanese invaded. Therefore, the Japanese soldiers proceeded to occupy and garrison the major cities of Changchun, Antung, and their surrounding areas. Whenever fighting broke out, it was usually due to miscommunication between the central government and the Chinese troops who were supposed to have been ordered to be nonresistant. However, in November, Ma Zhanshan, the governor of Heilongjiang, began resistance with his provincial army, followed in January by Generals Ting Chao and Li Du with their loyal Kirin provincial forces. Within five months of the Mukden Incident, the invasion of Manchuria had overrun all the major towns and cities in the three north-eastern provinces of Liaoning (where Mukden was), Kirin, and Heilongjiang, bringing them under Japanese control. However, opposition to the Japanese was only beginning.
Chinese public opinion strongly criticized Zhang Xueliang for his decision of nonresistance, even though the central government was indirectly responsible for this policy. Many had charged that Zhang\'s Northeastern Army of nearly a quarter million could have taken on the Kwantung Army of 11,000, and that giving up the three provinces without a fight was a great shame to the Chinese people. In addition, Zhang\'s arsenal in Manchuria was considered the most modern in China and that his troops had a few tanks, around sixty planes, four thousand machine guns, and a couple artillery battalions.
However, in reality, Zhang\'s seemingly superior force was undermined by several factors. One was that the Kwantung Army had a strong reserve force that could be transported by railway from Korea, which was a Japanese colony, directly to Manchuria. Secondly, more than half of Zhang\'s troops were stationed south of the Great Wall in the Hebei province, while the troops north of the wall scattered throughout Manchuria, therefore Zhang\'s troop could not have been deployed fast enough to fight the Japanese north of the wall. Also, Zhang\'s troops were undertrained and poorly led compared to their Japanese counterparts. And the most important of all, Japanese agents permeated Zhang\'s command because of his past (and his father Zhang Zuolin\'s) reliance on Japanese military advisors on equipping the originally warlord Northeastern Army. The Japanese knew the Northeastern Army inside-out and were able to conduct operations with much ease. For example, the Japanese detained Zhang\'s pilots on the night of the incident, rendering the airplanes useless without pilots.
The Chinese government did not resist because it was preoccupied with internal problems, including the newly independent Guangzhou government of Hu Hanmin, Communist Party of China insurrections, and terrible flooding of the Yangtze that created tens of thousands of refugees that needed help. In addition, Zhang Xueliang was in a hospital in Beijing, to raise money for the flood victims. However, in the press, Zhang was ridiculed as General Nonresistance (Chinese: 不抵抗將軍).
Because of these circumstances, the central government was unable to do much about the situation, and relied on the international community for a peaceful resolution. The Chinese foreign embassy issued a strong protest to the Japanese government and called for the immediate stop of Japanese operations in Manchuria, and appealed to the League of Nations, on September 19. On October 24, the League of Nations passed a resolution mandating the withdrawal of Japanese troops, to be completed by November 16. However, Japan rejected the League of Nations resolution and insisted on direct negotiations with the Chinese government.
Negotiations went on intermittently without much result. On November 20, a conference in the Chinese government was convened, but the Guangzhou faction of the Kuomintang insisted that Chiang Kai-shek step down for the Manchurian debacle. On December 15, Chiang stepped down as the Chairman of the Nationalist Government and the Premier of the Republic of China (head of the Executive Yuan). Sun Fo, son of Sun Yat-sen, became the Premier and vowed to defend Jinzhou, another city of Liaoning, which was lost in early January 1932. As a result, Wang Jingwei then replaced Sun Fo as the Premier.
On January 7, the United States Secretary of State Henry Stimson proclaimed that the United States would not recognize any government that was established as the result of Japanese actions in Manchuria. On January 14, the League of Nations commission, headed by the Second Earl of Lytton of Britain, arrived in Shanghai to examine the situation. In March, the puppet state of Manchukuo was established, with the last emperor of China, Puyi, installed as its head of state. On October 2, the Lytton Report was published and rejected the Japanese claim that the Mukden Incident was an act of self-defense. The report also ascertained that Manchukuo was the product of Japanese military aggression in China, while recognizing that Japan had legitimate concerns in Manchuria because of its economic ties there. The League refused to acknowledge Manchukuo as an independent nation. This caused Japan to resign from the League of Nations in March 1933.
Colonel Doihara used the Mukden Incident to continue his campaign of disinformation. Since the Chinese troops at Mukden had put up such a poor resistance, he told Manchukuo Emperor Pu Yi that this was proof that the Chinese remained loyal to him. Also, Japanese intelligence used the incident to continue the campaign to discredit the murdered Zhang Zuolin and his son Zhang Xueliang for "misgovernment" of Manchuria. In fact, drug trafficking and corruption had largely been suppressed under Zhang Zuolin.Edward Behr, ibid, p. 182-3
The Mukden Incident is depicted in the Tintin book The Blue Lotus, although the book places the bombing near Shanghai.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
